The present invention pertains generally to internet navigation, and more particularly to a method and on-demand tool for directly navigating to certain web pages in a web site.
Traditionally, browsers implement navigation to other areas, or xe2x80x9cweb pagesxe2x80x9d, on a web site via hyperlinks. A hyperlink, or simply xe2x80x9clinkxe2x80x9d, is special text in a page or a graphical icon associated with another web page. Links may also be present on a graphical image that includes regions associated with different pages. For example, a link defined as a graphical image of a human body may have different regions leading to different text pages. Thus, by clicking on the head, a text page of a medical diagnosis for the head is displayed; by clicking on the feet, a text page of medical diagnoses for the foot is displayed, and so on. Typically, when a link is activated (e.g., the user clicks on the link using a mouse), an internet browser downloads a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) web page from a host site and stores it in local memory. Common web browsers have a mechanism called a back link, or back button. This allows the user to retrace the path that was followed to arrive at the current page, and because the HTML data is available locally rather than requiring the data to be re-downloaded across the network, the path may be retraced more quickly.
One navigation tool frequently implemented in web sites is known as a xe2x80x9csite mapxe2x80x9d. A site map is typically designed to provide a comprehensive view of all elements on the site, generally in an expanded index format. Site maps generally display a text or graphical map of the web site, and, depending on the complexity of the site map, may or may not provide links to pages at the top of each sub-hierarchy of the major sections of the web site. The site map itself is a complete and separate web page that must be loaded in order to view. Because the links provided in a site map tend to be only to those web pages heading the major sub-sections of the site, and since web pages heading major sub-sections typically do not include substantive information but rather only links to other web pages that lead to pages that contain the substantive information of interest to the particular user, site maps therefore tend to provide only indirect links to web pages containing substantive information of interest to users.
Using current navigation technology, an inconvenience often occurs when a user is displaying a page somewhere in a web site, and has a need to view another page elsewhere in the web site in order to complete a task. In the prior art, the user must navigate from one web page to another via the hierarchical links on each page, or by using the browser""s xe2x80x9cbackxe2x80x9d button. In a large web site, navigation through a lengthy path of links may be quite cumbersome and time-consuming. What is needed is a method and mechanism for bypassing lengthy hyperlink paths in order to easily navigate to different web pages in a web site.
One method currently used for avoiding the requirement to traverse through each link in the web site is to display a series of links on each page in the web site. This method, however, is very costly in terms of consumption of available viewing space on each page. Furthermore, the space consumed by the series of links on each page provides only redundant information. It reduces the amount of available display space for useful non-redundant information available to the user, and additionally still takes some time to use. In addition, redundant series of text links do not scale very well due to display resolution, aspect ratio, or practical user viewing limitations. One method for limiting the space taken up by the series of text links on each page is to confine the series of links to a limited viewing window that is scrollable via a scrollbar. However, this method requires scrolling to view the available links, thereby lessening its convenience. The same scaling problem exists when the links are graphical elements.
Another method currently used to quickly navigate to a desired page on the internet is via the use of bookmarks. Bookmarking is a tool provided by internet browsers that allow a user to directly link to a favorite site or page in a web site by allowing a customizable user-selectable bookmark list. Bookmarks save the internet address of the associated web page in user-friendly hyperlink form. Thus, the selection of the desired bookmark from the bookmark list in the browser causes the web page associated with the bookmark to be downloaded and displayed by the browser without requiring the user to navigate to the site manually via a hyperlink path. However, before a bookmark can be saved as a bookmark, the user must still actually navigate to the desired page and manually add the address of the page as a bookmark. Furthermore, the addition of more than a few pages in a web site as bookmarks results in user cognitive overload, which can only be remedied by implementing some type of bookmark management (e.g., the creation of web site directories in the bookmark list).
The present invention is a navigation mechanism and method of operating the same that allows users to very easily and with very few key strokes navigate to main areas of a web site without having to use traditional methods that are available through HTML. Using the web browser the user can navigate very easily to main areas of the site. The invention overcomes the problems of the prior art by creating a drop down link selection list that occupies minimal display space but allows a user to simply select the list, pick a link to a web page entry, and navigate directly to the selected web page. The drop down selection list tool of the invention allows any number of directly accessible web pages to be listed, yet the entire list becomes visible only on demand by the user which results in only a minimal amount of display overhead while the user is viewing the main display. In addition, because the size and format (i.e., placement of listed items) of the drop down list when presented to the user is determined by the web site designer, relationships, such as the position in the site hierarchy of a particular page, are easily presented.